The 12th edition of the Hyderabad Literary Festival completed a circle on day two, when it started with two young professionals talking about their career shift, to end with focus lights on a world-renowned economist taking a break to write a cookbook.
The day began with Sidhartha Mallya, the actor-son of fugitive liquor baron Vijay Mallya, and actor Samir Soni revealing to moderator Anu Acharya in a session on mental health titled ‘Minding the mind’, the period of churning in their life that brought about major life-changing decisions for them.
Mr. Mallya shunned the opportunity offered by inheritance in India and chased his passion, while Soni got disenchanted with life as an investment banker. Both penned their thoughts on mental well-being in their respective works, ‘If I’m honest’ and ‘My experiment with silence’.
Mr. Soni says one has to de-condition oneself to realise what one really is. Success is somehow equated with happiness although both have nothing to do with each other, he said.
Mallya concurred and added that we are forced as children to choose what we wanted to do and hold on to it for life though deriving least joy from it.
The day progressed to an enlightening conversation, albeit mostly in Hindi, with the Punjabi author Des Raj Kali on his treatise ‘Shanti Parav’, a Dalit deconstruct of the peace claims in the source text with the same name from the epic Mahabharata.
It was followed by another talk titled ‘Heroes and Villains’, moderated by Uma Magal, who chit-chatted with two cinema experts, Balaji Vittal and Kaveree Bamzai, in the backdrop of their respective works ‘Pure Evil: The bad men of Bollywood’ and ‘The Three Khans: And the emergence of New India’. The discussion delved deeper into topics such as migration to Bollywood in the hope of making a name, and evolution of the villain characters in Indian films.
Post noon, the first session was dedicated to women doctors, the panelists being Kavitha Rao who, through her book ‘Lady Doctors’, shone light on the obscure stories of the first crop of female doctors in the country, and Kavery Nambisan, a surgeon cum novelist who has been fortunate enough to be able to pen her own memoirs of being in medical profession.
The final session saw Nobel laureate economist Abhijit Banerjee, together with his illustrator Cheyenne Olivier, providing a refreshing diversion from his subject of expertise into the lanes of culinary world, by way of his book ‘Cooking to save your life’. Idea for the book struck him when collecting recipes for his brother-in-law for a Christmas present, and he is unfazed by how the world would perceive this capricious shift. In his own words, the precept of ‘getting the most out of existing resources’ links both economy and cookery!
The panels were interspersed with a radio play, poetry recital session, and a cultural programme, to be topped with an interactive play in the end ‘The art of facing fear: World United’ by Rodolfo Garcia Vasquez.
